Washington, D.C., 1 October 2002 – The National Security
Archive at George Washington University announced today that
the senior surviving veterans of the Cuban Missile Crisis will
gather in Havana, Cuba, next week to discuss new evidence and
lessons learned from the moment when the world came closest
to nuclear war 40 years ago. Leading Cuban historical
actors will host participants such as secretary of defense Robert
McNamara, JFK speechwriter and counsel Theodore Sorensen, and
JFK aide and Pulitzer-Prize-winning historian Arthur Schlesinger
Jr., among others. From Russia, deputy foreign minister
Georgy Kornienko, missile deployment planner Gen. Anatoly Gribkov,
KGB officer Nikolai Leonov, and others will participate.

This historic conference will feature four panels: (1) from the
Bay of Pigs to the missiles, (2) the missiles and the October
crisis, (3) the November crisis and aftermath, (4) lessons from
the crisis. At the center of discussions will be thousands
of pages of newly declassified documents – from the Cuban government
itself, from the CIA, the Pentagon and the White House, from the
Soviet Foreign Ministry and the Politburo, from Warsaw Pact allies’
files, and from governments with embassies in Havana such as Great
Britain and Brazil – providing for the first time the Cuban and
multi-national perspectives on a crisis previously seen only in
superpower terms. Archive director Thomas Blanton said,
“The conference room will echo with words that resonate today,
such as ‘intelligence failure,’ ‘pre-emptive strike,’ and ‘weapons
of mass destruction.’”

The U.S. delegation arrives in Havana on Thursday, October 10;
the invitation-only conference – titled “La Crisis de Octubre:
una vision politica 40 anos despues” – will take place all day
Friday and Saturday, October 11-12. On Sunday, October 13,
conferees will visit the last surviving structure from the Soviet
deployment in 1962, a nuclear warhead bunker at the San Cristobal
missile site west of Havana. On Monday, October 14, participants
will depart Havana. On this day in 1962, a high-altitude
U-2 spy plane took the first photographs of the Soviet medium-range
ballistic missiles in Cuba – at San Cristobal.

The conference will meet at the Palacio de Convenciones
in Havana, Cuba. Most participants will be housed at the
Hotel Palco next door. Phone: 011-53-7-337235. Fax:
011-53-7-337236. The conference room itself is closed to
the press, except for the opening ceremony at 10 a.m. on October
11; but the organizers will hold daily press briefings each afternoon
summarizing the discussion and releasing key documents addressed
that day. The visit to the missile site is open to the media.
Journalists seeking to cover the conference should request press
visas from Luis Fernandez at the Cuban Interests Section (Washington,
D.C.), phone 202/797-8518.

The National Security Archive co-organized with Cuban institutions
the highly successful 40th anniversary Bay of Pigs conference
last year in Havana; this year, the Archive is also working in
partnership with Brown University’s Watson Institute. Peter
Kornbluh directs the Archive’s Cuba project.

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